JAMES L. BROOKS

Linking up the things you were with the things you become is what growing up is.

I think you have a pact with an audience in every picture, and I think the pact is to try and be truthful and to be real.

I had a marketing idea that everybody hated, decency is sexy.

I was only in college, unfortunately, for, um, a year. I think my major was public relations, and I had no idea what it meant except it seemed maybe attainable.

I always think a successful television series is the best job because it gives you community, it doesn't demand temporary insanity the way movies do, and you can be almost a normal person.

What does it mean for an actor to make a part his own? It means that he takes on what you had intended and starts to put in his own stuff so that it becomes something that could only happen if he played it.

That's the great thing about a series: you're driving to work, and you have an idea for a story for your characters, and you can go into work, and it's gonna be a television show. I mean that's what's great about the job.

I came to 20th Century Fox to do movies, and then they started a network, and they asked me to do a show as part of their starting what became the Fox network.

I value comedy. I value somebody who can be funny.

I always think that the deal, once I do the script, sort of the experience I go through writing, which is everything you can imagine, but I always think it's the one thing I can do when I'm directing is say is that it's all about the actors, that I can say, 'We're all here to serve the actors.'

I took some time out for life.

I was raised primarily by women. I had a mother who almost killed herself to survive, I had a sister who was eight years older who was like a second mother, and my mother had two sisters. In the environment I grew up in, I heard a lot of female perspectives.

Media reporting denied privacy to anybody doing what I do for a living. It was no longer possible to work on your picture in privacy.

Working on any show that works is the best job you can possibly have in any area of the business. You've got so much going for you, a good community, everybody's hanging together, and you get to do it every week.

I love it if comedy reflects real life because to me it's more reassuring that we'll get through.

I always loved writing, but never considered that I could do it professionally.

Things get very distorted when you do a movie, weirdly so.

I always fight hard to push a movie to the point where it pulls me.

I have a rule in research: The third time you hear something, it's generally true.

I laugh every day. There are days when my laughs are pretty hollow. Dust comes out of your mouth, and your bones make a funny sound. But I'm laughing.

I don't know whether I have ideas all the time. I think I'm curious about things all the time; I think I'm always curious, and I think I'm always interested in whatever passes by, and I know I tend to think about things, and I tend to talk about things, and sometimes that takes root and gives me something to chase.

Great things that can happen when you're doing a movie.

A lot of things just aren't true any more.

I have a lot of nightmares.

When you work alongside somebody day in and day out, the relationships tend to be wonderful: they're lifelong.